The Horatio
Incredibly wealthy and only slightly less deranged, Horatio was a trillionaire who left to discover his own star cluster. Finding a planet sprinkled with labs of ancient cloning technology left by the Endless, the boredom soon drove Horatio to create a race of allies, servants, and slaves who were every bit as beautiful as the most beautiful person in the universe - Horatio. Once the planet was repopulated, Horatio the First had only to look up, regard the stars, and realize how much more beautiful they, too, would be if they were filled with...Horatio. The rest, as they say, is history. Lore An exceedingly rich and exceedingly eccentric trillionaire who was exceedingly tired of everything, Horatio left the Mezari empire on a solo voyage. Crossing the galaxy in suspended animation, Horatio was awakened by the ship when it arrived at a habitable planet–of which he immediately declared himself Emperor. Horatio used information culled from Endless ruins on the planet and its two moons to gain unnatural extension to his own life. In-system exploration led to other discoveries and eventually, through advanced medicines and biological adaptation, he evolved his own body into his vision of physical perfection. Boredom set in after a few years, however, until Horatio had the brilliant idea of filling the planet–and why not the galaxy?–with the brightest and most beautiful sentient creature ever to exist: Horatio. After a few decades of experimentation his cloning program achieved something between perfection and success... An army of equally gorgeous clones are now ready, and the hordes of Horatios are prepared to follow their glorious leader and give the galaxy a proper make-over. Leadership The problem with Horatio is creating other Horatios as brilliant and beautiful as the original, but a bit more willing to follow orders. While it is rumored that perfect copies have been made, it is also said that these perfect copies were every bit as dangerous and megalomaniacal as the original. The consequence of this is that Horatio remains the leading decision-maker and planner of his vast empire. While some decisions have to be taken without his blessing due to pressures of time and money, these decisions–and the Horatio who make them–risk being canceled on a whim. Homeworld Horatio Prime is a world that in most other civilizations would serve as the vacation planet. Dry, warm, breezy, and beautiful, it is clear from the extensive Endless ruins that more than one spacefaring race has selected it as a preferred destination. Its current infrastructure projects tend to vary with Horatio's tastes; some buildings blend seamlessly with the landscape while others are garish and metallic statements of architectural extravagance. Society "The We", as they occasionally refer to themselves, is a society that has highly advanced cloning and biological sciences, but is relatively behind in other ways. Their goal is to re-create all of space in their own image, and to do this their primary need is to build the farms and incubators that grow Horatios. As they are humanoid, they require food, so development of agriculture and food supplies is also of great importance. As the First says, "You can never have too many Horatios." However, in spite of high population concentrations the society remains relatively calm and content; as Horatios have been carefully bred to be loyal and obedient, they lack the drive to seek change -- especially violent change. Necessity for survival will of course drive them to create weapons and more advanced ships, but their preference is to seek, colonize, and grow planets in the hopes of covering the galaxy with their kind. Traits Splicing Splicing a population adds the following bonus to your main faction (Horatio or Custom) population. Major Faction Splicing List Minor Faction Splicing List Ships Placeholder Strategy The Horatio can win almost any of the victory conditions because they snowball hard with their population growth and traits. Most of the strategy applies to the other races as well. # Expand quickly Start your first colony immediately and as soon as its done you should already have 2 more colony ships sitting in systems ready to set down to draw food from each. Build the colony ships ahead of time and send them to explore to find systems with high pop cap, preferably with strategic resources. Keep this going with as many outposts being fed at the same time as you have source established colonies to feed them. This is another reason to prioritize food production over everything else. 2. Skimp on any early military spending don't build bunkers, hangars, or military ships until you've built up your provinces with everything else. Instead, build early combat scouts without probes to fend off pirates and blockade your neighbor's outposts. They won't like it but it will pay off, and if you maintain enough combat scouts there is nothing they can do about it. Once you have your max colonies, start slowly building up money, strategic resources (buy them up on the market if you don't have enough), and some garbage attack ships. Switch your tech into the happiness and weapon techs, don't research anything extra you won't need in those branches. Once you have hyperian/titanium weapons/shields researched instantly upgrade your fleet and send it against your first victim. Your neighbors should be easy if you kept them from expanding. Once you take them out, you can sit back and let everything snowball and win a science or production victory, or keep churning out ships and researching military techs to take the rest of the galaxy 3. Manage your leading party effectively Try to get democracy as soon as possible, you want as many laws going as you can and itll be easier to choose laws from 3 parties than 1 or 2, you should end up with ecologist militarist and scientist as your leading parties, and depending on where you are in the game you probably want militarist to be the leading one Once you've settled in most of the systems you want and researched most of the habitat techs there's no point keeping ecologists in power, and the science bonus tech is rarely useful for anything. Until then, try not to upset things by building too many military ships (and this is the reason you don't build military installations either). Try not to build industry buildings unless the system specifically works well with it (IE don't build PTN unless the system actually makes resources) 4. Manage your pops Diversity is strength. The zavali will bonus your research when happy on a system, so try to have one on each system once you unlock level 2 province improvement, this will also make the most of your pop growth bonuses (which you should be using constantly), since it lasts for 10 turns, it will lead to more growth if you have pops on 6 systems getting the benefit. Don't rush to splice useful pops like pulsos because even if you leave one alive it will take a long time to repop, and even with splicing some of the minority pops are better to have than horatio until midgame when its more efficient to just stack your entire system with horatio (but by then it won't matter). Wait until you have several races in your empire before you start splicing so you can decide on the best order, because it will suck to have to wait to get 8 of a certain pop you want benefits from because you spliced 2 pops before. The rest of your strategy depends on which pops you gets as you explore. You can also genocide pops like this. If you have a pop who's ideology causes it to be unhappy and unproductive, wait until there's exactly as many as you need to splice and get rid of all of them. Once you start conquering majors, this is a good way to clear out their systems so you can fill them with more productive horatio pops 5. Food Prioritize pop growth over everything else, and everything else will follow. The production bonus from a new building is less than the FIDSI from more people from more farms. Category:Factions